Dora Kallmus may be the greatest fashion photographer you’ve never heard of.
Born in 1881 in Vienna, she focused on that city’s royals and Rothschilds before moving to Paris, where she befriended fashion’s elite: Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Chanel, Lanvin. Not only did she photograph them and their fashions, but — under the name Madame d’Ora — she also shot the most famous painters, writers and philosophers of her day.
But in 1940, the Nazis seized Paris, and Kallmus, who was Jewish, went into hiding. When she emerged, some three years later, many of her family and friends were dead. For the rest of her life, she trained her lens on the displaced, the desperate and the dying.
Few people have had a second act as dramatic as hers, let alone a portfolio as varied. You’ll get a good sense of it at the Neue Galerie, whose new show, “Madame d’Ora,” includes roughly 100 photographs — both the elegant and the agonizing.
Kallmus had a gift, says curator Monika Faber, for making her subjects more attractive than they actually were. A century before Photoshopping, society women and artists cried, “Make me beautiful, Madame d’Ora!” and were pleased with the results.
Kallmus herself, though charming, “was no beauty,” Faber says, and the self-portraits in this show — nearly all of them featuring the artist’s dogs, which were adorable — bear that out. An early love affair ended in tears, and she never married. Her most enduring relationship was with photography.
She loved fashion and took endless photographs of haute couture, many of which are on display here, along with several of the actual, extravagantly embroidered gowns created in Vienna over a hundred years ago. After establishing her studio in Paris in 1923, Kallmus took hundreds of photos of hats alone, including one that looked like a bird atop her friend Maurice Chevalier’s head.
She often caught her subjects in uninhibited poses. Her photos, nude and not, of Josephine Baker, the African-American entertainer who became the darling of Paris, are positively playful. But there’s a moodiness in some of her portraits, taken as they were between two world wars, that hint of the losses to come.
Kallmus was able to escape the concentration camps (she died in 1963), but her beloved sister, Anna, didn’t — nor did millions of others. For the rest of her life, she was haunted by the specter of innocents led to slaughter. After the war, Kallmus began to shoot harrowing images of animal carcasses at actual Parisian slaughterhouses. These after her series of photographs of refugees — some old, some young, all poor.
Seen through Madame d’Ora’s sympathetic lens, the displaced are as deserving of our notice as any of the starry beings she photographed years before. Once seen, they’re impossible to forget.
“Madame d’Ora” runs through June 8 at the Neue Galerie, 1048 Fifth Ave., at 86th Street; NeueGalerie.org.
